HitFix First Look: A 'Community' family reunion

Dan Harmon didn't leave an awful lot of dangling threads for his "Community" successors to tie up, but one big one is Jeff Winger's search for closure with the father who abandoned him and his mother when Jeff was young. This Thursday's episode, "Cooperative Escapism in Familial Relations," finally brings Jeff face-to-face with the man he's resented for so long — in the form of an actor who's starting to specialize in playing estranged TV dads.

In this clip — exclusive to HitFix for the next few hours — Jeff and his father attempt to lay out the ground rules for how this reunion will work, with help from Britta, who's overjoyed by the opportunities this presents to test out her new knowledge (or lack thereof) of psychology.

Alan Sepinwall has been reviewing television since the mid-'90s, first for Tony Soprano's hometown paper, The Star-Ledger, and now for HitFix. His new book, "The Revolution Was Televised," about the last 15 years of TV drama, is for sale at Amazon. He can be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

THE NEW SHOWRUNNERS CAN'T DO GOOD CLIPS AND I KNOW BECAUSE I AM A TV GENIUS THEY ARE BAD AT EVERYTHING BASED ON A MINUTE OF VIDEO I DECIDED THIS EPISODE SUCKS BEFORE EVEN WARCHING IT WHERE IS DAN HARMON WAAAHHHHH WAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

Lol. This comment made me laugh. But I will say that this one particular clip was pretty unfunny. But that doesn't mean the rest of the episode will be that way. I've more or less enjoyed the first four episodes

I'm interested to see what happens, if just because I invested in the beginning of the series and this storyline was important. Pity that's what the series became for me, viewing out of curiosity the disjointed mechanics. Mostly out of respect just because there was a time it really surprised me and loved the combination of writing and characters.

Britta's entrance in the end of the scene with one of her psycholo-propisms bothers me because it tries too hard, delivered sitcom style, you can hear the laugh track afterwards, and not Community style, where lines were delivered in conversations that went by in real time and the convoluted Britta-logic (or Pearce or Troy/Abed isms) felt part of the mix and fit the tone (this did not) even as the scene goes on.

So yes the new episodes aren't awful, but Community was more than "not awful".